"Obama Is Stupid": The Stupid Thing Conservatives Love To Say

Newt Gingrich, the man who might win tomorrow’s South Carolina primary, loves to challenge Barack Obama to a series of lengthy, un-moderated Lincoln-Douglas debates, and he did again last night. It’s the usual Newt gesture: a grandly empty suggestion that his head teems with policies of such irreducible complexity—"I think grandiose thoughts," as he put it onstage less than 24 hours ago—that they can only be expressed in the same amount of time it takes to cross the United States by balloon.

Newt boasts that these debates will be conducted without teleprompters—a shallow dig at Obama that feeds the president’s critics two satisfying lines of assault. For conservatives and liberals infuriated by Obama’s measured cadences and insistence on rhetorical balance and compromise, it suggests that his unflappability is all pretense, unsustainable in the real world that real men inhabit, where spitting is permitted and there are Islamofascists to wrestle shirtless. But it also suggests something far more satisfying to the GOP base: Newt, ever the cherub-faced and gloating prick, is implying that Barack Obama is stupid.

GOP pundits have trotted out the "Obama is stupid" charge regularly since 2008, but it’s always felt like filler—some meaningless lobbyist conjunction added before launching into another bit of pre-fab mendacity. In the last few months, however, it’s seemed more like rescue. As the GOP campaign swarmed to flat tas, Iran and Israel—like children playing soccer, shambling slackjawed after the ball—the safe rhetoric of "OBAMA DUMB!" has risen to a kind of Hulk-smash ejaculation of thoughtlessness. It’s name-calling of such inane finality that it makes rational debate cease. It obscures unsustainable policy and off-message waffling. Whenever Mitt Romney’s think-tank goblins need to change the narrative from whatever message they can’t agree on, they can switch to the message that Obama’s a stone dummy. That’s what Romney’s really saying whenever he trots out his applause-line chestnut that Obama is a good man who is "in over his head."

It was in the op-ed pages of neocon sinecures where the seeds of "OBAMA DUMB" were first planted, and where they reached full throat. Bret Stephens kicked off the latest iteration of the meme in the Wall Street Journal, in a column last August titled "Is Obama Smart?", enumerating Obama’s sins with a list of banalities and comparing his performance in office (unfavorably, duh) to a presidency unobstructed by reality.

Worse, while Obama’s oratory is credible, Stephens argues that his punchiness displays a lack of substance. If only Barack could find his "Where’s the Beef?" moment, misquote a Clint Eastwood movie or dare the entire radicalized Muslim world to "bring it on" from his position as the most well-defended person on the planet.

Stephens goes on: "Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful. But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence."

It’s not surprising that Stephens has the rudimentary self-awareness to try to ward off this argument: after all, he was one of those people who stretched Sarah Palin’s record to the thinness of cotton candy to try to paint her as a modern-day Harry Truman.

Self-awareness poses no obstacle to J.R. Dunn in the American Thinker, who kicks off "How Stupid Is Obama?" (a column published the same day as Stephens’, without acknowledgement, as if both miraculously, simultaneously arrived at some universal unalloyed truth) with a litany of fatuous straw men about liberals’ attitude toward the president. "Obama, we were told, was the rare possessor of a mind with the profundity of a Socrates, the breadth of a Goethe, and the penetration of a Newton." This is a helluva talking point for 2009, back when claiming that liberals worshipped Obama as "The One" at least had the virtue of being novel idiocy. It hasn’t occurred to Dunn that this line of attack works better if your entire party’s decision making apparatus doesn’t rely on looking at a bumper sticker reading "What Would Reagan Do?" or consulting a magic 8-ball that reveals answers like, "Well..." "There you go again," "Naptime, Mommy", and "I don’t recall."

Dunn’s reverence for genius parallels Stephens’. In 2008, he likened Palin to Truman and Lincoln, and he described her as "a superb example of the 21st-century American woman, knowledgeable, capable, and admirable."

I don’t know if this is the sort of analytical product usually available from the American Thinker. I’m just saying that it’s good of them not to precede "Thinker" with any kind of complimentary adjective. This is a magazine of thoughts people were thinking, and, when they thought them, they were in America. Do not confuse this magazine with American Respirator, which is a magazine dedicated to breathing here. Still, if "it takes one to know one" is a valid rubric for evaluating punditry, it’s hard to think of anybody more qualified than J.R. Dunn to accuse someone of being a moron.

Of course, the 200lb. feces-throwing gorilla in the room is George W. Bush. Watching the GOP go from defending Bush to impugning Obama on the issue of intellect is such an Orwellian black-white inversion of reality that you could literally write it out as IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH EXCEPT WHEN IT’S NOT. This is the state of the modern GOP, where Wall Street reform causes financial crises, and the socialized medicine of Obamacare had to be defeated to defend Medicare.

It’s not hard to see the argument’s appeal, though. Simply in GOP Southern Strategy terms, "Obama is dumb" will always work for racist party members who cleave to a perverted eugenicist view of blacks as inherently subhuman. It also speaks to every "silent majority" resentment that Obama’s accomplishments feed: if he’s actually a stupid man, then he didn’t get anywhere on his merits, which validates the honestly squalid, insignificant lives of people who fail in comparison. From a more elevated plane of the discourse, however, it does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to dismissing the narrative of Obama’s life.

Quick quiz. Which of these people do you think represents the GOP’s most idealized candidate in terms of the party’s myth of American private sector self-invention? Is it a man who’s been campaigning for four years already and whose wealthy father was also a governor? A millionaire lobbyist with fundraising ethics violations, serial adultery problems and a 30-year record of making money as a government insider? Or a man from a broken home and modest means who overcame numerous boundaries and prejudices, became the president of the Harvard Law Review, worked in low-income neighborhoods and eventually joined a respected law firm?

Obama confounds the GOP narrative, because he’s a self-made millionaire who somehow doesn’t think the GOP is the solution. He defies the essential Republican tautology that all Republicans are people with his wealth and record, and all people with his wealth and record are Republicans. Meanwhile, his presence in the election implicitly shames Romney’s state-hopping privileged opportunism and Gingrich’s engorged government parasitism.

Calling Obama stupid instantly explains everything about him. This is how wealthy people come to believe in socialism and not giving Israel carte blanche to bomb whomever it wishes: you have to be stupid not to want to do that. This is how health care, the stimulus and compromise happen. This is how someone whose centrist policies—private-insurance friendly heath care reform, market-based traded emissions caps and Reagan-sized tax burdens—can be awful even while resembling a GOP campaign platform from the 1980s. His every success is diminished by stupidity, just as every failure is reified.

His biography doesn’t matter anymore: if he’s actually stupid, then he won his accolades via racial preferments or the intervention of benefactors. It allows him to be "an elite" and a regular guy and have both simultaneously prove his falseness. This way, an "elite" person can be dumb, while his "regularness" was perverted by interventionist regulation of the law student market, the lawyer market, the senator market and the presidential market. There’s a reason why clowns at the NRO and Weekly Standard love invoking the pitiable, brainwashed, dead-thought metaphor of The Manchurian Candidate when talking about Obama. Not only does it winkingly make him "The Other," it shows how every success he’s enjoyed only confirms how dumb he is and needs to be.

It’s the ultimate playground argument against a politician, because it explains everything while dismissing any inroad against it. Obama is for things because he’s stupid, and if you think that’s wrong, that’s stupid. You’re stupid. You’re so stupid.

—Mobutu Sese Seko

Mobutu is the founder of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, a political blogger for Vice and an occasional contributor to Deadspin and The Classical. He enjoys playing with his dogs and has refrained from murdering anyone for nearly two decades.

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